Voluntary Action

An Issue at the Interface of Nature and Culture

Edited by Sabine Maasen, Wolfgang Prinz, and Gerhard Roth

We all know what a voluntary action is--we all think we know when an action is voluntary, and when it is not. Yet, performing and action and defining it are different matters. What counts as an action? When does it begin? Does the conscious desire to perform an action always precede the act? If not, is it really a voluntary action? This is a debate that crosses the boundaries of Philosophy, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Social Science. This book brings together some to the leading thinkers from these disciplines to consider this deep and often puzzling topic. The result is a fascinating and stimulating debate that will challenge our fundamental assumptions about our sense of free-will.

Voluntary Action

An Issue at the Interface of Nature and Culture

Edited by Sabine Maasen, Wolfgang Prinz, and Gerhard Roth

Description

We all know what a voluntary action is--we all think we know when an action is voluntary, and when it is not. First, there has to be some wish or goal, then an action designed to fulfill that wish or attain that goal. This standard view of voluntary action is prominent in both folk psychology and the professional sphere (e.g., the juridical) and guides a great deal of psychological and philosophical reasoning. But is it that simple though? For example, research from the neurosciences has shown us that the brain activation required to perform the action can actually precede the brain activation representing our conscious desire to perform that action. Only in retrospect do we come to attribute the action we performed to some desire or wish to perform the action.

This presents us with a problem- -if our conscious awareness of an action follows its execution, then is it really a voluntary action?

The question guiding this book is: What is the explanatory role of voluntary action and, are there ways that we can reconcile our common-sense intuitions about voluntary actions, with the findings from the sciences?

This is a debate that crosses the boundaries of Philosophy, Neuroscience, Psychology and Social Science. This book brings together some of the leading thinkers from these disciplines to consider this deep and often puzzling topic. The result is a fascinating and stimulating debate that will challenge our fundamental assumptions about our sense of free-will.

Voluntary Action

An Issue at the Interface of Nature and Culture

Edited by Sabine Maasen, Wolfgang Prinz, and Gerhard Roth

Table of Contents

General Introduction Voluntary Action: An Issue at the Interface of Nature & Culture, Sabine Maasen, Wolfgang Prinz and Gerhard Roth.Between Motivation and Control: Psychological Accounts of Voluntary Action, Wolfgang PrinzHow Do We Know About Our Own Actions?, Wolfgang PrinzAcquisition and Control of Voluntary Action, Bernhard Hommel5. Voluntary Action and Cognitive Control from a Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective, Thomas Goschke6. Voluntary Action from the Perspective of Social-Personality Psychology, Ute Bayer, Peter M Gollwitzer & Melissa Ferguson7. The Interaction between Cortex and Basal Ganglia in the Control of Voluntary Actions, Gerhard Roth8. How Do We Control Action?, Rudiger Seitz9. Self-Generated Actions, MarcJeannerod10. Between Epiphenomenalism and Rationality: Philosophical Acounts of Voluntary Action, Tilmann Vierkant11. Mental Causation: The Supervenience Argument and the Proportionality Constraint, Jurgen Schroder12. The Explanatory Role of Consciousness in Action, Naomi Eilan12. How Voluntary are Minmal Actions?, Joelle Proust13. Rational and Irrational Intentions: An Argument for Externalism, Wilhelm Vossenkuhl14. Between the Normative and the Symbolic: Juridial and Anthropological Accounts of Volition, Sabine Maasen15. First-Person Understanding of Action in Criminal Law, Bjorn Burkhardt16. Voluntary Action and Criminal Responsibility, Klaus Gunther17. Culture and Human Development in a Theory of Action Beliefs, Charles WNuckolls18. Questioning the Multidisciplinary Field